From The Princeton Theological Review, xviii. 1920, pp. 545–610.
The assault on the Reformation conception of the Christian life could not end on so ambiguous a note as that struck by Pfleiderer. On the contrary, what may very properly be spoken of as the last word said in furtherance of it, was the most direct that had been said since Wernle’s own, and in many respects the most forceful and telling of all. We are referring, of course, to Hans Windisch’s at once brilliant and ponderous volume on “Baptism and Sin in the Oldest Christianity up to Origen,”1 which was published in 1908. We have already pointed out the relation of the book to Wernle’s published twelve years before. It came into the controversy which Wernle had provoked, very distinctly at the end, when the debate was languishing, and indeed, from the point of view of Wernle’s contentions, when the battle was lost. It had much the appearance accordingly of a last vigorous attack, seeking to wring a victory out of defeat. And assuredly little was left unsaid by Windisch that could be said to rescue and save a lost cause.
What Windisch undertakes to do, to speak now of the formal contents of his volume, is to take up Wernle’s proposition that to Paul Christians are in their actual nature sinless men, to justify it by a really thorough exegetical survey of the Pauline material, and then to place it in its historical connections both narrow and broad. For this purpose he traces the related conceptions with the same thoroughness through the rest of the New Testament books, and then extends the view backwards to Ezekiel and forward to Origen. He discovers preparations for the theory of the sinlessness of Christians, attributed to Paul, in the prophets’ demand for repentance, in the Jewish dogma of the sinless man of the end-time, and in the sacramental rite of cleansing baptism. He follows what he thinks of as survivals of the Pauline conception through the early Patristic writings, pausing at Origen only because he discovers in him the complete dissolution of the theory of baptismal cleansing and the recognition of the natural necessity of sin, even for Christians. It is naturally, however, upon the New Testament text itself that he expends his chief effort, and he discusses this with a minuteness of detail, a fulness of exegetical comment, and a richness of illustrative remark which make the volume in effect a commentary on the entire New Testament from the point of view of its witness to the relation of the Christian life to sin. This detailed discussion of the New Testament text is of course the strength of the book; but, since its task is approached from a point of view really alien to the New Testament, it is also its weakness. Many concessions require to be made, many acts of exegetical violence are committed, much special pleading is indulged in, and it still remains necessary to declare the New Testament writers constantly inconsistent with themselves. Under whatever form it may be put forward, it is very clear that this is not really exposition. It rapidly becomes obvious to the reader that the New Testament passages which are discussed cannot be strung on the thread with which they are approached, and the most thorough of all attempts to show that to the New Testament writings the Christian is a sinless man becomes, by the very attempt to be thorough, its most thorough refutation. It becomes ever more and more plain that the text is intractable to this theory of its meaning.
We are not surprised, therefore, to observe that Wernle, reviewing the book under the spur of a wholesome sense of his own partial responsibility for its vagaries, throws into primary emphasis the notable lack of plain, human common sense which, despite all its diligence and acuteness, deforms its exegesis; and the general deficiency in it of a feeling for reality. “During the reading of great parts of the book,” he says, “we live in the labyrinth of a bewitched world, while the simple reality of life lies without.”2 In other words, Windisch has not shown us the plain three-dimensioned world which the New Testament reflects; he has attempted to work out a new two-dimensioned or four-dimensioned world, and to impose that on the New Testament writers as their own. Naturally everything in their world, under this treatment, takes on an artificial aspect. “What kind of a Paul is this that is depicted,” cries Wernle,3 “a Paul for whom in the Epistles to the Corinthians the occurrence of sin in Christianity ‘obviously’ and ‘again’ ‘makes theoretical difficulties,’ who over against the same Corinthians ‘artifically creates the problem of the sinful Christian,’ who at 1 Cor. 10:1 ff. ‘deals plainly with the problem of sin after baptism,’ who gives to his Galatians as sinful Christians an injunction to the sinless life and sets before them the essence of the Christian as sinlessness, whose whole point of view is dominated by an ideal portrait of the Christian according to which the disappearance of sin characteristically accompanies becoming a Christian? I find this Paul, despite all the pre-Christian elucidations which Windisch adduces, a total psychological enigma; and not only he but all the primitive Christians in the mass must have been visionaries and dreamers if the author’s closing result be right—that Christians are in their real nature sinless men. No day perhaps passed for them in which intelligence of faults, failings, aberrations, did not smite their eyes or ears from near and far; and yet, for example, it was so difficult for the preacher of Second Clement, because of his rigoristic theory of baptism, to make a demand for repentance, that he must writhe about sadly before he can give to Christians the exhortation to penitence demanded by the actual state of things. And why so? Because first of all for all those Christians a theory of sinfulness was firmly established, and it was only with the presupposition of this theory that they could approach empirical reality.”